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Monks Bolster China’s Quake Relief Effort

Survivors in Jiegu slept in the open air in a city square on Sunday. Tibetan-run groups have been allowed to offer aid and medical services, unlike in 2008.Credit
Du Bin for The New York Times

JIEGU, China — Long after the bulldozers have gone silent and the rescue workers have retired to their tents, the only sound in this earthquake-battered city is the plaintive barking of dogs that have lost their homes, and in many cases, their owners.

As the smoke from a thousand campfires filled the air early Sunday morning, solitary figures shuffled through the darkness, heading to no place in particular. Some, like Tsai Ba Mao, 63, were drawn to a tent off the city’s main square, where Buddhist monks had created a makeshift temple filled with rows of yak-butter lamps. A cardboard sign above the entrance read “Pray for the dead,” written in Chinese and Tibetan.

Like nearly everyone else in Jiegu, a high-altitude city in western Qinghai Province, Ms. Tsai was grappling with loss, in her case, the death of her 34-year-old son in the collapse of the family’s home. “I can’t sleep,” she said. “The pain is too great.”

The earthquake, which struck early Wednesday, killed at least 1,900 people in Jiegu, famed for its horse-racing festival and purebred Tibetan mastiffs. With hundreds of people still buried under rubble, the toll is expected to rise. Everyone, it seems, lost a relative.

The Chinese government has undertaken an aggressive relief effort. In recent days the city has been flooded with soldiers, medics and supplies. The response has been so great, and traffic downtown so bad, that the government has urged volunteers to stay away.

President Hu Jintao, who cut short a state visit to South America after the quake struck, flew to Jiegu on Sunday, consoling victims and promising to rebuild. “There will be new schools!” he wrote on a blackboard in a tent filled with orphaned children, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. “There will be new homes!”

But perhaps just as striking as Beijing’s rescue-and-relief juggernaut is the highly visible operation mounted by Buddhist monks, thousands of whom have traveled long distances from Tibetan areas of the country. They distribute packaged biscuits, tend huge vats of barley and dig for bodies.

Like their makeshift prayer tent in central Jiegu, much of that help has been uncoordinated, and for the moment, tolerated by a government suspicious of grassroots organizing and especially organized religion.

Photo

Medics, soldiers and supplies have flooded into Jiegu in recent days.Credit
The New York Times

The Communist Party has long had a tempestuous relationship with the country’s ethnic Tibetans. Ties have been particularly strained since March 2008, when violence broke out across the Tibetan plateau. The worst, in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, left 18 dead and scores wounded, many of them Han Chinese migrants from the east.

Although officials canceled the annual horse-race festival that year, Jiegu has largely remained quiet. “We have not had troubles like other places,” said Aji Suo Nade Ji, 36, a secretary in the local environmental bureau. “Maybe it’s because we have always been given more freedom to practice our culture.”

On Saturday, local monks organized a mass cremation of 1,400 bodies in Jiegu that took place without any government involvement. Since the quake, several Tibetan-run organizations have been allowed to provide aid and medical services. By contrast, many nongovernmental groups were barred from participating in relief efforts during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province.

Robbie Barnett, the director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia, said he hoped Beijing might see the disaster as an opportunity to sow goodwill. “What’s happening is remarkable and impressive,” he said of the government’s relief effort and its laissez-faire approach to the work of the monks. “The party is certainly good at generosity. They know how to be very generous, and they know how to be ruthless. This is one of those generous times.”

There have been a few uncomfortable moments. Some monks say soldiers blocked them from digging in the rubble during the first days after the quake, and it is widely believed that the government has undercounted the deaths.

But for the most part, the monks have been given wide latitude to carry out their religious duties, which include saying prayers for the dead, a central element of Tibetan Buddhism that aims to calm the soul and help it attain a good rebirth.

As soon as it went up on Saturday, the prayer tent on Gesar Square became a hub of activity. Not long after a local businessman brought by two generators he had dug from the ruins of his shop, someone delivered power strips, forming a vast cellphone recharging station. A soldier from the People’s Liberation Army donated some gasoline.

Within hours, monks had fired up stoves fueled by donkey dung they had brought from their lamasery in Sichuan Province. Back in the tent, above the blazing row of butter lamps, someone — no one would say who — mounted a photo of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader who is considered a subversive by the Chinese government. When they saw the photo, people held their chests and uttered words of devotion. A few sobbed uncontrollably.

The police, at least on Sunday, did not seem to mind.

Ms. Tsai, the woman who lost her son, wandered into the tent around 3 a.m. and quickly found her calling. Someone had left a box of brass butter lamps, and they had to be cleaned and filled.

By daybreak, as the refugees sleeping on the square began to stir, a monk switched on an amplifier, and chanting began to float out over the city. Ms. Tsai said she was exhausted but at peace, at least for the moment. “The government can help us rebuild,” she said. “But what they can’t do is heal our heartache and pray for our dead.”

Zhang Jing contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Praying and Digging, Monks Bolster China’s Quake Relief Effort. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe